Caretaker
by Strummer Pink
Summary: The sorceress La Belle Dame Sans Merci, (or Belle for short), is a collector of magical items. Tipped off by the man in the red woolen hat, she visits a Frontlands village slave market to locate a rare glamor spell. Upon discovering that a sickly slave possesses a magical ability she has never encountered before, Belle takes him back with her to the Dark Castle to study him better.
1. Chapter 1

La Belle Dame Sans Merci, or just Belle for short, was a collector. Her thing was collecting talismans, totems, items with potential magical energy. Strong emotions attracted magic like metal filings to a magnet and magic, or rather the potential for magic, was what attracted Belle. Her enhanced senses could sniff out objects imbued with even the slightest hint of magical potential, usually things associated with important emotional moments in a person's life. If you knew how to sense them you could find such objects all over the Enchanted Forest and it was to her advantage that so few humans could see that what was magically valuable wasn't necessarily valuable in the usual market value sense.

But wasn't that your average human all over? Belle thought, always placing value on precisely the wrong things. How many of objects of greatest power in her collection were ones she never even had to strike a bargain for? A shocking number in fact, had been found in rubbish tips. As the Dark Sorceress, La Belle Dame Sans Merci was quite lucky she could enchant her nose not to smell some of the odors, or she would've spent a good deal of her object hunting hours being thoroughly sick, considering some of the places she found her curiosities in.

Even though she was immortal, she did possess senses other than the olfactory ones that could be sickened by some of the less salubrious locations she occasionally found herself in.

Still, despite the nature of this particular market day's trading,the marketplace was a pleasant change. It was soothing in a way, to be surrounded by so much bustling movement, vitality and life after the silence of the Dark Castle.

Although Belle didn't need to eat, she was drawn to a cart selling savoury pastries, similar to the ones she'd had as a girl, hot and fresh enough to scorch a normal human's fingers at a touch. Belle touched them and felt nothing.

Her gaze drifted to plump chickens and rabbits in wicker cages. There were colourful rugs knotted in intricate patterns, perfect to stare into on a winter's night beside a roaring fire. There were carved icons of gods and goddesses from a multiplicity of faiths and other peddlers shouting out the prices and merits of their wares accompanied by sellers of drums and mouth harps, lutes and other musical instruments demonstrating the full range of their instruments.

It was all so delightfully distracting. She often came to such places to draw herself off from her dark internal musings, the ruminations obsessions of the spirit that lurked within her, always on the look out for ways to sew mischief, always tilling back the soil of long buried resentments in her mind, ready to plant chaos in such fertile soil.

Not that disorder was always a bad thing. Too much order was never any fun. It clamped things down and closed off possibilities. Without a trickster to shake things up now and again, the world would be so _boring._ Now if only she could convince those blasted fairies of her own necessity to the natural balance of things, she might finally have some peace. All she really wanted, she tried to convince herself, was to be left alone.

Left alone… unbidden thoughts of what waited her in the palace, came back to her. She thought of her silent library then. Libraries were supposed to be quiet, of course, but in hers the only sound that could be heard was the soft whisper of spider legs as busy arachnids wove their webs, and her own soft footfalls on the floor, echoing like giant's steps, on the cracked marble tiles of vast cavernous rooms, clouds of dust rising up in her wake wherever she trod. She could just see the few dust free areas where she was want to pace by the fire, just hear the tired floorboards creaking under her feet as she ascended the stair, but when she looked down all was straw beneath her feet and the dirt and dust of the market. It was a gloomy, grayish sort of day and lamps hung from poles around some stalls, giving off much needed warmth and light.

She had no need for lamps or lanterns, not anymore. In her true form even the mice scurried to hide from the large, lamp-like eyes that raked over the dark passages of the castle like twin search lights. In velvety darkness her scaley blue skin glowed, a thin rim of gold around each scale. The folk from nearby towns and villages called her home the Dark Castle, not only because of what once transpired within it, but for its present owner's utter disregard for all sources of artificial illumination.

Rifling through second hand trinkets this otherwise unmemorable Frontlands village, Belle let the scent of desperation overwhelmed her, trying to pinpoint the magical source that had drawn her to this out of the way place. It clung to certain items on the table like sticky tar, still strong and distinctive even after several changes of ownership. To a regular person, the magic contained in such items would remain dormant, potential power untapped, but Belle, both because of what she was and what she had taught herself over the years, knew the secret to coaxing magical energy out of seemingly ordinary objects and more difficult still, how to control and command the magic once released.

Ignoring the pricier offerings of gold and jewels on the table Belle bargained with the peddler for a well-worn toy rabbit, a pair of red dancing shoes and a fake pearl necklace. All told her purchases were hardly worth the trouble of the trip, but she wasn't ready to write it off yet. The slave auction had yet to start.

The man with the red woolen hat who styled himself a "a procurer of hard to find items" had tipped her off about this particular location. She'd been to it a few times already in different guises in the past month or so, without luck. Perhaps it was time to revisit Smee and take back the reward she'd given him, with a little extra payment for good measure. It wouldn't do for anyone to think the Sorceress of the Dark Castle was going soft in her dotage now would it?


	2. Chapter 2

Belle regarded the slaves with the large pupiled eyes-daemon fleur her busy mind supplied - a herb slavers favoured that could be slipped into hot tea. It dissolved easily in warm liquid and in controlled doses it could confer on the user numbness to pain and lower the level of a fever. In higher doses it increased tractibility and surpressed defiance, but it wasn't cheap. Belle bet these poor souls only got to taste that particular nectar of oblivion pre-auction. It was a desperate trick, but she supposed with slaves in ill health it was either a drop or two of pricely daemon fleur or lose the value of the whole shipment altogether.

Despite it all, she let the slaver go about his ruse. She reminded herself that the usage of a banned drug on these poor unfortunates was not the reason she was here. Her purpose, she told herself firmly, was to find the glamour spell amulet. The cruelty of these mortals to one another was of no consequence to her greater objective. And yet…

She wished sometimes she could turn the darkness within her on or off at will; she could use some of the apathy it gave her now, its ability to take the long view, to regard these people around her as transient, their troubles momentary and insignificant. Typical, she thought, the one time she needed to cloak herself in the "merciless" attitude she was so famed for, the cursed spirit within her grew dormant. It was at times like these that felt every one of her 100 plus years weighing heavy on her heart. Though her exterior remained youthful and flawless, inside she felt weary, oh so very weary and older than the most aged crone in the marketplace.

She wondered what they'd say if she turned off her own glamour spell. When she exposed herself in all her scaled glory they would call her a witch, a succubus and agent of darkness among other less illustrious titles. Typical of the small minded, thinking evil to be some big showy thing involving magical curses and demonic appearances. While she did possess huge lamplike eyes that glowed in darkness, scaled skin, immortality and magic, as well as a castle gaurded by gargoyles that occasionally came to life and devoured intruders for breakfast; to her mind evil's truer aspect was that found among ordinary people in prosaic surroundings like these. True evil didn't announce itself with a loud bang and a puff of smoke. What made it truly wicked was that it was accepted, so much a part of the fabric of daily existence that people ceased seeing it as wrong, just shrugged if off and said "that's the way of the world."

You didn't need to search for a forbidding castle on a hill surrounded by stone monsters to look upon the face of evil. It was here in full force at the market the first Sunday of every month.

Belle tried to ignore the spectacle of mendacity presented by the villagers, who spent their money trying to outdo each other in buying delectable feasts and decorations for fictional dietities who could not appreciate them, while real people starved in chains right here in the town square just because somewhere along the line someone had categorized them as "slave."

Somehow or other the free folk had managed to truly convince themselves that the people being sold were less than human and could be treated accordingly. Meanwhile, ironically la Belle Dame Sans Merci, the true inhuman, walked among them in noblewoman's disguise, afforded every politeness and courtesy the villagers and traders could muster.

All this, it reminded Belle far too much of things she had no wish to remember. How could she have so much magic and yet still lack the power to forget her yesterdays. Why couldn't she do something the tiniest, unschooled newborn infant did with every slumber? It would be so pleasing, so easy to torch this entire village to the ground, just so it would cease to remind her... No! It was best she go, before she attracted the wrong kind of attention.

But then a new group of slaves were brought out. Right away she knew there was something off about the three men and two women now standing in chains upon the stage. For one, they were in far too good condition to be sold in a backwater place like this, showing no signs of the hard travel and deprivation they ought to have. Even dressed in nothing more than strips of fabric that left little to the imagination, didn't even shiver in the cool autumn air. The men and women were all uniformingly young, clear eyed and free from sores, their teeth white and straight, the men well muscled, the women high breasted and strong. Most telling of all they all looked clean and well fed, cleaner and better fed in fact than the villagers milling around. It had been a lean growing season after all and the Duke had taken more than his usual share of the crop at tax time once again. Belle clicked her tongue at the slaver's foolishness. Anyone with at least an iota of cleverness might have at least aimed for something a tad more believable.

Belle skirted the edge of the crowd until she was around the back of the stage following the scent of magic.

In the wings behind the stage, a middle aged man in a greasy apron sat staring into the empty brass bowl in his lap, bending his head low to whisper into its depths. Him? Belle's extra senses flicked over this unappetizing individual. No, this fellow was simply suffering from a diseased syphyllic mind. This particular village had a surfeit of such poor wretches. She found what she sought in his companion, a seemingly ordinary looking man, with similar facial features, possibly his brother, though she really didn't care. He held an amulet in one hand and a half finished turkey leg in the other.

"Oi there wench, bring me another!" he cried out when he spotted her, glamour-spelled to look like a serving woman.

"Seriously?" Belle had never let one of her ownn glamour spells drop faster. It was quite satisfying seeing the fellow shrink back as she was revealed in all her scaled glory.

"Shit."

"Indeed."

With a wave of her hand Belle the amulet transferred itself to Belle's hand. She knew the instant its former owner's spell was broken, from the collective gasp of the crowd clearly audible from the other side of the curtain.


End file.
